Griesel was born in 2013 in an old traditional winery located in the centre of the small town of Bensheim in the Hessische Bergstraße, carved into a hill called ‘Griesel’. Niko Brandner, partner and director of the estate started in 2014 to buy a few old vineyards around Bensheim on soils with very high potential, mainly granite: the vineyards here are very small, sometimes steep and very diverse and require a lot of manual work. Niko is now helped in the management by Rachele Crosara from Parma, who came to Griesel as an itinerant winemaker and planned to stay for an internship in the 2017 harvest. Niko, seeing potential in Rachele, managed to retain her. Having become a cellarer in the first place, Rachele is now definitely Niko’s right-hand woman in all oenological matters. She studied oenology in Piacenza and did several internships in Italy, California and New Zealand. The grapes are harvested manually and after the whole bunches are pressed, the first fermentation takes place spontaneously as for malolactic fermentation. Second fermentation in the bottle strictly follows the classic method, with long stays on the yeasts. The desire of Niko and his team is to produce pure, terroir-oriented sparkling wines that aim for the paradox of being light and complex at the same time.